More good news on the kelp monitoring project. This is a key indicator species that the Northwest Straits Foundation, the State of Washington and the Marine Resource Committees have been helping monitor, and now it looks like we will get better satellite data on the whole coast.
An ambitious project to map and monitor sea kelp forests along the entire B.C. coast is afoot, and scientists are using seemly disparate tools — both ancient and modern — to do it. Researchers are using centuries-old British sea charts and advanced technology, such as camera drones and satellite images, to trace shifts in the abundance and distribution of kelp beds over time, said geographer Maycira Costa. Rochelle Baker reports. (National Observer)
Sea charts and satellites: Mapping critical kelp beds along the Pacific coast
Filed under: Environmental Science |
Hey Al,
The satellite and aerial data is good, but what we’ve been finding during a Clallam County MRC motorized kelp monitoring survey of the Strait is that we are able to identify species of kelp present (Bull kelp and Giant kelp the species of major interest. There’s some indication that a lot of kelp that is underwater never gets recorded from the air. We’ll be working on that in the coming year to see if that’s true. At this point in the process we’ve looked at about a third of our coast line. Though the Strait of Juan de Fuca seems to have been spared so far from the kelp decline of many other parts of the Pacific coast, interviews of fishermen suggest that kelp beds have been declined, just not as much as elsewhere.
I have kelp beds in my “front yard” Rita
On Tue, Jan 19, 2021 at 12:49 PM Olympic Peninsula Environmental News wrote:
> Al Bergstein posted: ” More good news on the kelp monitoring project. This > is a key indicator species that the Northwest Straits Foundation has been > helping monitor, and now it looks like we will get better satellite data on > the whole coast. An ambitious project to map and” >